The eagerly anticipated fourth volume of Jonathan Sumption's prize-winning history of the Hundred Years War.

Cursed Kings tells the story of the destruction of France by the madness of its king and the greed and violence of his family. In the early fifteenth century, France had gone from being the strongest and most populous nation state of medieval Europe to suffering a complete internal collapse and a partial conquest by a foreign power. It had never happened before in the country's history - and it would not happen again until 1940. Into the void left by this domestic catastrophe, strode one of the most remarkable rulers of the age, Henry V of England, the victor of Agincourt, who conquered much of northern France before dying at the age of thirty-six, just two months before he would have become King of France. Following on from Divided Houses (winner of the Wolfson History Prize and shortlisted for the Hessel-Tiltman), Cursed Kings is the magisterial new chapter in 'one of the great historical works of our time' (Allan Massie).

What history records as the Hundred Years War was in fact a succession of destructive conflicts, separated by tense intervals of truce and dishonest and impermanent peace treaties, and one of the central events in the history of England and France. It laid the foundations of France's national consciousness, even while destroying the prosperity and political preeminence which France had once enjoyed. It formed the nation's institutions, creating the germ of the absolute state of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In England, it brought intense effort and suffering, a powerful tide of patriotism, great fortune succeeded by bankruptcy, disintegration, and utter defeat. The war also brought turmoil and ruin to neighboring Scotland, Germany, Italy, and Spain.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title The Hundred Years War was a vicious, costly, and, most dramatically, drawn out struggle that laid the framework for the national identities of both England and France into the modern era. The first twenty years of the war were positive for the English, by any account. They already held the South of France, through Eleanor of Aquitaine's dowry, and were allied with the Flemish in the north. After the brilliant naval battle of Sluys, the English had control of both the English Channel and the North Sea. The battles of Crécy and Poitiers gave the English a powerful toehold on the continent; they even captured the French king, Philip, occasioning a peace treaty in 1360. This long-awaited third volume of Jonathan Sumption's monumental history of the war narrates the period from 1369 to 1393, a span marked by the slow decline of English fortunes and the subsequent rise of the French. The English were condemned to see the conquests of the previous thirty years overrun by the armies of the king of France in less than ten. Edward III was succeeded by a vulnerable child, destined to grow into a neurotic and unstable adult presiding over a divided nation. England's citizenry was being asked to pay for a long and expensive war, soldiers were becoming disenchanted, and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 evidenced the social unrest in the land. However, France too paid a heavy price for her success. Beneath the surface splendor the French government sat poised at the edge of bankruptcy and the population subsisted in fear and insecurity. The inexperience of Charles VI and his gradual relapse into insanity divided the French political world, as the king's relatives competed for the plunder of the state, sowing the seeds of disintegration and civil war in the following century. Marshaling a wide range of contemporary sources, both printed and manuscript, French and English, Sumption recounts the events of this critical period of the Hundred Years War in unprecedented detail.

The glory and tragedy of the Hundred Years War is revealed in a new historical narrative, bringing Henry V, the Black Prince, and Joan of Arc to fresh and vivid life In this captivating new history of a conflict that raged for over a century, Gordon Corrigan reveals the horrors of battle and the machinations of power that have shaped a millennium of Anglo-French relations. The Hundred Years War was fought between 1337 and 1453 over English claims to both the throne of France by right of inheritance and large parts of the country that had been at one time Norman or, later, English. The fighting ebbed and flowed, but despite their superior tactics and great victories at Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt, the English could never hope to secure their claims in perpetuity: France was wealthier and far more populous, and while the English won the battles, they could not hope to hold forever the lands they conquered. Military historian Gordon Corrigan's gripping narrative of these epochal events is combative and refreshingly alive, and the great battles and personalities of the period - Edward III, The Black Prince, Henry V, and Joan of Arc among them - receive the full attention and reassessment they deserve.

For over a hundred years England repeatedly invaded France on the pretext that her kings had a right to the French throne. France was a large, unwieldy kingdom, England was small and poor, but for the most part she dominated the war, sacking towns and castles and winning battles - including such glorious victories as Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt, but then the English run of success began to fail, and in four short years she lost Normandy and finally her last stronghold in Guyenne. The protagonists of the Hundred Year War are among the most colourful in European history: for the English, Edward III, the Black Prince and Henry V, later immortalized by Shakespeare; for the French, the splendid but inept John II, who died a prisoner in London, Charles V, who very nearly overcame England and the enigmatic Charles VII, who did at last drive the English out.